At a glance headlines: March 27, 2014

Fund for School Games volunteers is unveiled, a new First World War online resource is launched and a new video to help teachers and students learn basic sign language are among the SecEd At a glance headlines for March 27, 2014.

School Games

It is hoped that more than 1,400 extra volunteers and coaches will be recruited and trained to help deliver the School Games after funding was extended for a further year. The £490,000. Volunteers and Coaches Fund aims to increase the quantity and quality of the volunteers who support the national School Games competition. More than half of primary and secondary schools took part in the School Games in 2012 and this new funding is to be distributed through Sport England to county sports partnerships, with each receiving £10,000 to recruit, train and deploy 20 volunteer leaders and coaches to support the games – a total of 1,470 across the country. The majority of these volunteers will be young people between the ages of 16 and 25.

First World War

A new resource to help teachers engage students with the centenary of the First World War has been unveiled by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Virtual Cemetery is an online, interactive tool for the classroom and offers a range of activities for key stage 2 and 3 pupils studying citizenship, history and religious studies. The website includes videos and image galleries as well as a teacher’s section with curriculum notes, lesson plans and classroom ideas. Visit: www.cwgc-virtual-cemetery.org

Curriculum support

Teachers want to better understand what their students cannot “get”, according to new research. Awarding body OCR is creating new resources for reformed examinations and commissioned Cambridge Assessment, its parent organisation, to look into what kind of curriculum support teachers wanted. It found that teachers of subjects like science and geography want help in understanding students’ common misconceptions. However, teachers of humanities subjects such as English want better support on ”metacognition” – how students learn to learn. Visit: www.ocr.org.uk/reformresources

Sign language

Teachers are being asked to learn 11 basic phrases in British Sign Language. Charity Signature has released a free training video to mark the 11th anniversary of British Sign Language being recognised as an official language. It hopes that the film will raise awareness among both students and teachers. One in every six people in the UK experience some form of hearing loss and Signature argues that it is vital more children learn basic British Sign Language to bring about social inclusion within our communities. Visit: www.signature.org.uk/eleven-signs

Dream housemates

Teachers are apparently the most popular flat mates according to a survey. The poll by website easyroommate.co.uk involving 1,000 flat and house-sharers found that 54 per cent would prefer to live with a teacher, just ahead of medical/health workers (53 per cent) and IT professionals (50 per cent).